My suspicion is that this is a bug in the keyboard hardware for your laptop. The fact that an external keyboard works strongly suggests it's not a configuration problem (say, some kind of keyboard remapping utility running on your system or something). It's certainly not a problem endemic to laptop keyboards generally (some years ago, I used to have a Windows laptop with a numeric keypad, and it had always worked fine for me). Since most applications don't distinguish between keypad Enter and main keyboard Enter, one could understand how such a problem might survive testing by the hardware designer.
If that's the case, then it would literally be impossible to work around the problem by any software means, since the two keys on your keyboard are sending identical signals into the system.
John Fultz
jfultz at wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.
On Dec 5, 2013, at 2:04 AM, Dan O'Brien <danobrie at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's common knowledge that the numberpad "enter" will evaluate cells
> without needing the "shift+enter" when using the normal keyboard enter
> button. I have a 17" laptop with full keyboard + numpad but when I use
> the enter button on the numpad it behaves like the normal enter, i.e. i
> still have to use "shift+enter". When i plug a USB keyboard in, the
> numpad enter works as expected and just evaluates the cell.
>
> I have played with numlock and looked briefly into control panel
> settings to see if there's some setting that is not right but there is
> nothing obvious. A quick google search turned up nothing obvious. I'm
> wondering if others have encountered this.
>
> In[115]:= $Version
>
> Out[115]= "9.0 for Microsoft Windows (64-bit) (January 25, 2013)"
>
>
>